VS Code has a growing variety of users beyond professional developers.
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Microsoft code editor Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is only five years old, but the developer tool has gained impressive acceptance among the global developer population.
VS Code today has 14 million users, Microsoft reports (there are approximately 24 million developers worldwide, according to Statista), and it gained five million new users over the course of 2020 thanks to a growing variety of users beyond professional developers and the need for development. distance during the COVID-19 pandemic. In June last year, Microsoft said VS Code had 11 million users. Its success is built on GitHub, Electron, Chromium, JavaScript and Microsoft’s JavaScript superset, TypeScript.
Julia Liuson, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s developer division, thinks the growth in VS Code adoption has come as people outside of professional developers increasingly find the need to use the editor.
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“Traditionally, we only saw professional developers, but we see a very broad group of users – people doing DevOps, people doing IT administration, we see a lot of students using the tools,” Liuson told ZDNet.
Since it is a text editor, people don’t even need to know how to code to use the software. According to Liuson, even some journalists use VS Code to write stories.
“The strategy for VS Code is basically to support our every, every, every strategy. You can be a developer working with any programming language, working on any operating system, and developing any kind of software.”
VS Code runs on macOS, Windows 10 and multiple distributions of Linux, it supports Arm64 on Linux and runs on Raspberry Pi and Chromebooks. It is also available in preview form for insider builds of VS Code on Apple’s arm-based M1 chips.
Part of VS Code’s popularity is the breadth of language extensions for C ++, C #, Python, and various Python libraries for data scientists, Java, and JavaScript / Typescript.
“When we started with VS Code, we took this approach where we really wanted to be at the forefront of where the demand is most. We really have a tight integration of VS Code and TypeScript. VS Code is built on TypeScript. But we invested in a enormous amount of language enhancements, ”Liuson said.
“We have nearly two million Python developers using VS Code and over a million C ++ developers using VS Code. And even our Java usage is approaching a million.”
GitHub, the code-sharing site Microsoft acquired in 2018, is also central to the company’s open development processes for some products such as VS Code, Typescript, and some of its rejuvenated retro software such as PowerToys.
Liuson also talked about Microsoft’s inner source approach to software development. The company doubled down on its inner resource in 2019 and recently highlighted its inner-source approach as a factor that mitigated the SolarWinds hackers’ threat of accessing the source code.
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Microsoft did not coined the term inner source and the approach involves adopting open source development practices and applying them within one organization. GitHub and GitHub’s Enterprise Server are a perfect fit with this approach to help organizations collaborate, but do so in private.
“Inner source means that you have a private IP, but you invite other teams within the company to work with you. That’s the fundamental difference between open source and inner source. Today, it is very common in large enterprises: there are too many silos – but in microservice architecture you sometimes have to find a problem, ”said Liuson. “That’s when you think about using the open-source model within the business context, with the appropriate permissions. For me, it’s not that different from how people collaborate on SharePoint, Word documents, or G Suite.”
Liuson says the US Code feature called Live Share, which launched in 2017, is getting a “ton of adoption” due to WFH practices, while Microsoft is investing heavily in IntelliCode, its AI-powered code completion feature. IntelliCode is an extension for VS Code and supports code completion for TypeScript and JavaScript, Python, Java, C ++, C # and Java.